This newspaper, as well as Newsday, have published some clear-cut stories of local government corruption. Corruption in local government?
As old as the first village, no doubt; certainly, something that has been common to local, rural county government as well as big city rule since the beginning of our country. Human nature travels with the immigrants of all types who cross oceans to settle new lands.
As my grandmother used to say,” we bring ourselves to wherever we go”.
In reading Newsday’s recent series profiling Gary Melius and his vast tentacles of self-dealing and power, we see through one very fine, microcosmic example how self-dealing and narrow self-interest – some simply call it: greed! – can cost everyone.
Reading how Melius was part and parcel of the creation of the six-figured salary Nassau police system and the broken, bankrupt county finances created with the first Mitchel Field leases, I could not help comparing reading the series to a feeling that I would have had if I saw a truck going over a cliff one fearsome clip at a time.
Corruption may seem ‘harmless.’
It lines the pockets of one or a few, it is said, but does not necessarily beggar the community. That is nonsense.
Melius’ story is a readable template that overlays the story of how our local finances, governments, ways of doing business and the pressing, high levels of taxation and fees retard meaningful economic growth.
To use Malcolm Gladwell’s appropriate terminology, we may well have reached a “Tipping Point” on tolerating the tightly woven fabric of insider deals, self-dealing corrupt cronyism, a total erasure of propriety lines between governing and enriching, and a class of elected officials who kowtow to the Melius’ of the world.
Maybe.
Gary Melius’ foundation has done many good things. It has helped many fine, vital causes and people. So too has he backed good government electeds who govern well and, in the public’s, best interest.
Melius’ way of doing business is metaphor, illustration and case study method for understanding. Cicero posited that ‘biography is destiny’. It is, too when reading of the smaller-bore corruptions that this paper, too, has ably reported.
The tipping point is a decisive action that is an additive to many of the same types that finally ‘tips’ action towards resolution – but not always positive resolution.
Take 1974. The first election since “Watergate” saw a revolutionary sweep in Congress. Younger, more modern people were elected to both houses.
First-time changes on seniority power, committee rule, scope, budget process and a new recognition of more dissident voices occurred.
Always for the long-term better? No. But changes come in slices, not one massive loaf.
The tipping point may well have been reached with the elections of Madeline Singhas, Laura Gillen and Laura Curran; the public spoke against cronyism and insiderism in recent elections.
The open government activities fostered in Glen Cove and North Hempstead, for instance, are responses to this newfound ‘tip’ towards governmental cleanliness. No entity is perfect. Bad apples of both parties still bob up in the barrel.
Greed, cronyism and the desire to fix, arrange, manage and control gain will always exit if people have money. Power is money, and money is power.
But so, too is a free press, the lamplight of democracy’ as Paine, Jefferson, et. al. has said. And let it shine on here on Long Island.
Jon Weinstein
Port Washington
